Pretty scary, considering Twitter has become the networking, information, and search engine of choice for many business professionals.

Building Your Social Networks

There used to be a time where I’d find people in my industry on Twitter and get giddy when I saw they had hundreds of thousands of followers. “Wow, this must be an influencer,” I’d think, and *click* went the follow button. Today, this is not the case. Now I determine who is “important” by what they say, when they say it, and through my own analysis.

Let’s get this part out of the way. Don’t buy twitter followers, okay? DON’T DO IT. Why? What’s the harm? To borrow a phrase from Peter Shankman, A KITTEN DIES EVERY TIME YOU BUY FAKE FOLLOWERS. I shouldn’t be typing in all caps here, but I’m going to break that rule for the sake of Twitterkind. Maybe it’s not that extreme, but it’s certainly tarnishing your brand and dwindling the platform that we are banking so much on (social media strategy and budget, anyone?).

Starting from scratch on social media can be daunting, yes. But I guarantee building your networks organically will be much more valuable in the long run than buying followers to raise your clout (or Klout) in the online sphere. The result will be a tightly knit, engaged network that is willing to advocate for your business and be brand ambassadors – no spambot does that.

Social media makes it easy – perhaps, too easy – to find new “people,” so we need to get into the habit of thinking twice when we do our metrics or look at our community numbers to protect the value of social media for business moving forward.

If you don’t buy fake followers, there’s still a good chance you have a few of them trolling your account. Do yourself a favor and look at the people following you on Twitter. If their profile picture is an egg, block them. If they are following thousands of people and only have one tweet, block them. If a profile doesn’t have a bio, then examine them more closely.

Getting Rid of the Fakes

If this is way too much of a manual process for you, following are a few apps that can help manage your followers:

StatusPeople can get you started by showing you how many of your followers are good, inactive, or fake.

Check out ManageFlitter, which lets you unfollow inactive users, or users who haven’t tweeted in six months.

The most proactive thing you can do is to take a look at the end of each day (or week) who has followed you, and do a three-second investigation on each. If they look real – cool. If there’s the slightest doubt that they’re fake, inactive, or spammy, then block or report them for spam.

Facebook has also recently revealed that 83 million of their 900 million active users are fake accounts. No bueno. Maybe not a cause for worldwide panic, but for communicators like us using social media platforms for PR or marketing, it’s definitely reason to mind our accounts closely and take the time to get to know our users and weed out the fillers. Your community will reward you and your social media efforts will improve as a result.

Stacey Acevero is the social media manager at Vocus. You can find her scouring Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn every day, creating content about PR, small business marketing, SEO, social media and marketing. Follow her on Twitter at sacevero.

For what it's worth, StatusPeople (the site referenced in this article), is what I would call "Not Ready for Prime Time". It does not deliver consistent, accurate results, and considering the Salem Witch Trials which ensue from using its product, arguably should be tabled until they can produce a verifiable output.

I have notified the company repeatedly about specific issues (after several weeks, they informed me that their "customer feedback form" went straight into "junk mail"), before finally contacting them via Facebook. Although they are now aware of the problem, they have never remedied it, nor published any statement to their customers to my knowledge (even though presented proof that they were delivering inaccurate results).

The only solution they proposed was to offer me a one-month refund.

To the rest of you, I would not rely on the results you receive from a StatusPeople search. Sorry, wish I had better news to report. I love the concept, I really do. Maybe another company will spring up and duplicate the app, with better success.

It's absolutely true that fake followers are the top level of a cascading avalanche of failure. If you have fake or inactive followers, they can't or won't respond to your content. That will throw your numbers off. And I say that from years of testing what the RESULTS of these actions are rather than passing a morality-based judgement -- it just doesn't work to have more followers than the action on what you share can back up. But given than even the official Twitter account has 33% fake or inactive folllowers, it makes me wonder how scientific this method of measuring which followers are fake and which are simply inactive. Unlike MySpace where everyone was automatically Tom's friend, Twitter isn't set up so that you have to follow Twitter when you first use Twitter. You have to manually follow at least your first follower.

During a normal week I go up and down by 10+ followers. I guess people follow and if I am not interested in their "thing" I don't follow back and then invariably they unfollow me. Must I ALWAYS reciprocate?

I like your suggestions and I actually have been checking out my followers up to now. I hopefully have deleted the ones that fit the profile of spammers or bots or whatever. Don't want too many. Just means more work. There's just this one @PeteTheTapeWorm that I can't figure out if it's a real person or not. Huh. :-)

For my personal twitter - I have always taken the position of following people that I am interested in reading their tweets or links to articles. I have not been obsessing with my number of followers because that was not my intention of using twitter. Having said that, my follower number have grown albeit slowly over the past couple of years. I have also started using Engagio to manage my social conversations and build relationships. Engagio has a unique way of building your contact list and it is based on people you 'conversed' with - it is not as easy to follow people as it is on Twitter but the end result is better signal to noise ratio.

I love the ones who have 100,000 followers, follow just 47 people, then follow me. Then when I follow them back... they unfollow me. So they still follow just 47, but they now they have 100,001 followers.

Twitter games are so much fun, I sure hope I win one of these days. :)

I think the fake Follower Tool is awesome and was so pleased to see you included that in your post, Stacey. I find myself wondering about the inactives though. I spent a couple years lurking in social media and on Twitter before I felt really comfortable about being too talky. I wonder how many inactives, or lurkers, are reading every word but not yet ready to comment?

I absolutely agree that checking the authenticity of your new followers should be part of your daily (or at least weekly) routine. Just add it to the list: floss; drink coffee; go for a run; block spammers. Seems like a small thing to do, but ultimately it is your reputation that's on the line. And as they love to say in those MasterCard ads, that's priceless.

@barrettrossie No kidding. I find that frustrating...I mean, it's tough to keep up with people once you start following in the thousands (my tweetdeck is constantly scrolling) BUT but for me it is a more valid experience as I am constantly discovering people in the industry. I combat this by compiling Twitter lists segmented by subjects. I'm sure that person could do the same...but prefers not to.

@Ari Herzog Interesting - so the app isn't completely flawless. Good to note. I like to keep these things in mind...especially if at one point my followers come up 97% fake, I can take that with a grain of salt.

@allenmireles My inkling is quite a few. I was a lurker at one time too, constantly reading and devouring and rather than engaging. Inactive doesn't necessarily mean they're bad followers, I guess is the takeaway from this (which is why I stress observing the tweet streams of people who follow you). It's easy to spot "empty accounts" versus accounts which just update less frequently than we may be used to.

[…] Sadly, social media platforms like Twitter are full of fake users and they’re altering your numbers. Spin Sucks shared a great article that examines Faking it on Social Media: What are the Costs? […]

[…] September 18th post by Stacey Acevero explored an issue that really irks me. Fakes and cheaters. Faking it on Social Media: What are the Costs? illustrates how fakers are undermining social media’s credibility, and why building a network of […]